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Nonprofit Technology News Celebrity Forecasts for 2014

Now that this year is wrapping up and we have the verdict
on nonprofit technology
trends for 2013, we queried charity Technorati like Amy Sample Ward, Beth Kanter, Marnie
Webb, Peter Campbell, Nicole Wallace, the entire crew at Idealware, Lucy
Bernholz, and other
luminaries to find out what is in their crystal balls for 2014.

"If 2013 was the year of
the infographic, I think 2014 will be the year of more dynamic data. We
have certainly seen some examples of maps or charts that the user can interact
with, but with the over saturation of static infographic images, 2014 and
the plethora of tools emerging that make these options really easy, we
will see more organizations using data for storytelling that users can
watch, click on, and really explore."

"In 2014 we will see
websites starting to streamline, influenced by responsive design practices
and the influence of microsites. Whether for a campaign, an appeal, or an
organization's main web presence, I think 2014 will see organizations
focus their online content on specific actions or messages, pulling back
from the clutter or information overload."

Beth’s prediction is that cows will tweet! By that I think
she means that the Internet of
Things (IoT) will become more evident and more a factor in our lives in
2014. IoT is the trend in which non-human things
are more and more connected through the Internet to each other.

“Now the people are connected with each other, we will be
connected to more things. The convergence of mobile, social, data, and
wearable technologies means a lot of data about our preferences will be generated
and that means we will have a more customized experience. It also means that
privacy issues -- when there is a person on the other end of aggregated data
are going to be much more of an issue."

Marnie is watching the
field of complex data. As online tools and information become increasing
available to non-statisticians. She cites the City of Oakland California’s Open Data
Platform that
make over 50 datasets viewable and understandable to the public including
ones on crime, city infrastructure, parks and recreation facilities, and
green businesses.

MOOCs or massive online
open courses are one of Marnie’s technologies to pay attention to this
coming year. It is also one of Lucy Bernholz’ promising emerging
technologies that failed to take off in 2013. Marnie cites the work of the
nonprofit Khan Academy,
which offers “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” Khan
Academy’s comprehensive library of content covers a full primary school curriculum plus classes in math,
and science including biology, chemistry, and physics. She also cites the
MOOCs being offered from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Stanford and
equally prestigious universities in other countries.

DIY Hardware, according to
Marnie will be something to watch in 2014. This is a deep tradition among
technologists and hearkens back to things like the Home Brew Club
back at the dawn of the personal computer age where Apple Computer was
born. This past year the nonprofit Raspberry
Pi caught some attention. It’s a very low-cost little credit-card sized computer designed
for education. Lifehacker
has a great list of things DIYers are doing with it. In her
presentation, Marnie also talked about DYI design work being done using
tools like the Autodesk design suites that recently
became available to nonprofits by donation. She also likes the Suprmasv hacker community where
NPTechies can go to get help, information and find others interested in
harnessing the power of hacking for good. That’s an astonishing resource.

Privacy is also on
Marnie’s top five list, so she agrees with several of our NPTech
celebrities that it is a top issue and that it will shape our work in the
coming year.

2014
will be the year of the cloud platform – more and more nonprofits will
move to Salesforce and Microsoft integrated solutions as Microsoft gets
more stable and usable and third party Salesforce fundraising systems
mature. Cloud services are rapidly scaling to the point where larger
NPOs can safely adopt them, and Google and Microsoft will keep the heat on
to get NPOs there at low cost.

The
progression with social media will be steady. As Twitter and Google
Plus still adopt their more business-focused strategies, nonprofits will
benefit from the added functionality. Facebook will still dominate.

Tablets
will rule. Most of us will redo our websites to be responsive in
light of that (and those that don’t will look really bad). It
probably won’t be until 2015 or later that tablets reach the point where
they can replace a laptop or desktop completely – office application use
is still too stunted by the small screens and keyboard issues – but more
and more people will have them.

In 2014 there will be some
important new CEOs. Microsoft’s changes will probably be healthy for
nonprofit technology as Bill Gates still chairs the board and his focus on
philanthropy probably won’t dampen. It will be interesting to see how
quickly they’ll migrate their users to Office 365. My guess is that it
will continue to be aggressive. Blackbaud’s new CEO, Michael Gianoni, will
probably be less aggressive. There are acquisitions (like Convio) still to be sorted out and most
importantly I’ll be watching to see which products will be discontinued.

Nicole Wallace

Nicole Wallace is Senior Writer for The Chronicle of
Philanthropy. She writes about innovation in the nonprofit world, social
enterprise, and charities’ use of technology. She has overseen the Chronicle’s technology
column since 1999.

2014 will be the year that
nonprofits stop thinking about mobile in isolation, but will instead
integrate mobile into their overall fundraising plans, social-media
strategies, and in some cases even program work.

In 2014, a growing number
of nonprofits and foundations will move beyond just collecting data about
their programs and start using that information to improve performance.

Lisa Pool

Lisa Pool is the executive director of the Technology Affinity Group (TAG), the online community and annual conference for
foundation techies. Full disclosure, she also manages Simplify, a
new partnership between TAG and GuideStar, which is a new approach to applying
for grants.

Foundations
will radically change their grant application process by adopting Simplify,
a new approach to information-sharing between funders and grantees that
includes a common database of core organizational information and a common
data standard for the sector. For more information, visit www.simplifynow.org.

Foundations
will no longer need to provide laptops/desktops for all staff - the
increased functionality of tablets will lead to tablets replacing
laptops/desktops as the primary device for some staff and combined with
the increasing popularity of BYOD policies, the foundation will not have
to provide laptops/desktops for those that opt to use a tablet instead of
a laptop/desktop.

John Merritt

John Merritt is the CIO of the YMCA of San Diego County.
He is the 2009 NTEN Award winner and has been a nonprofit techie for over 18
years. John runs a complex IT system at the YMCA and always works toward making
it people-centric. He is known in NPTechland as one of the great ones who has
helped many organizations.

In fundraising, John
boldly predicts that single channel fundraising is dead. Nonprofit
fundraising in 2014 will be multi-channel.
By single channel John Merritt means using only one, often traditional,
way to reach donors – like email or direct mail, but leaving out all other
options. He says that this is a critical issue, especially with potential
younger Generation Y and millennial donors, who expect to be contacted on
their terms. Their terms include channels like text, Twitter and other
mobile oriented channels. John’s bold recommendation is that nonprofits
not using SnapChat to get their
stories out there are missing a golden opportunity – especially with millennials.
He cautions that the practice of reaching people via mobile, web, social
media, email etc. will require solid analytics to track & leverage
donor engagement.

Cloud &
Mobile

Cloud backup will evolve
into cloud disaster recovery: smart organizations will make sure they can recover
apps & data in the cloud greatly reducing down time when disaster
strikes.

BYOD
(bring-your-own-device) and the consumerization of IT will give nonprofits
huge cost savings for leveraging technology to meet their missions, but
will require solid security systems & policies coupled with industry
standard Mobile
Device Management.

Lucy Bernholz

Lucy Bernholz is deservedly among the biggest names in
philanthropy and technology. She is the founder and president of Blueprint
Research & Design. She is also the publisher of Philanthropy 2173, one of the leading
philanthropy blogs and the philanthropy contributor to the Huffington Post. She is
a Fellow at the New American Foundation
and a visiting scholar at Stanford University where she’s doing astonishing
work at the Digital
Civil Society Project, which examines the 21st Century technology-driven
innovations in philanthropy and civil society. I especially like her Emergence
of Digital Civil Society report that she wrote with Rob Reich, Chiara
Cordelli.

Blueprint
2014 is the latest Lucy Bernholz forecast on philanthropy. It’s a monograph
published by GrantCraft, a joint service of the U.S. and European Foundation
Centers. One thing I always like are her list of buzzwords for the coming year.

Topping her 2014 list for
buzzword of the year is ‘privacy’. She notes that we are all stakeholders
in a public verses privacy data debate due to our vulnerabilities in our
digital communications.Several NPTech celebs agree with her.

She also likes the word
‘makers’ which is the movement toward old fashioned handmade goods, no
doubt made available online via Etsy,
the increasingly popular marketplace for handcrafted items.

She also likes the word
‘metadata’ which cropped up in the 2013 NSA spying
scandal. Metadata are the tell-tale tracks we leave behind with
our computers and mobile devices that are being carefully collected by
governments and companies.

Here are some of her
predictions:

Digital tools for
humanitarian aid work will become more common in disaster responses and be
integrated in the disaster relief infrastructure.

New
mobile money tools will be bigger in 2014, things like peer to peer
payments, perhaps like the new free service called Square Cash that I covered in our November
NPTech News, that lets you email cash to anyone with an email address.

She
forecasts that GitHub will be a big deal for charities in
the coming year. It is a new web-based hosting service for software
development projects.

She forecasts that humanitarian
groups will develop codes of ethics and new standards for digital privacy.
If this is so, I fear we’re putting a lot on the American Civil Liberties Union
and Electronic Futures Foundation.

And now very for Lucy’s
most mysterious prediction: we will have a major scandal in the crowd
funding marketplace. What does she know and how does she know it?

And now for Lucy’s charity
superhero prediction: Nonprofit organizations will take over city
functions such as managing transportation infrastructure. Nonprofits will
become the savior for financially strapped cities. Wow. What can you say
to that?

Idealware

Idealware is a Portland, Maine-based nonprofit who’s
mission is to inform charities on making smart technology decisions. They are
far famed for their deeply researched, and impartial reports on a wide variety of
nonprofit and foundation technologies, including their recent book, “The 2013 Field Guide to Software for
Nonprofits.”

Idealware recently did a free webinar presented by all six
of their full-time staff members called “Hoverboards
and Videophones: Idealware Looks to 2014.” It was a great online event
where I got a much better sense of the people there. Here’s a bit of what they
covered.

Kyle Andre, research
analyst, predicts that Twitter’s Vine
app and its seven-second videos will be appearing more on our
smartphones and further shortening our attention spans. Wearables like
Google Glass and smartwatches will further require us to establish
personal relations with real humans.

Tyler Cummins, Marketing
and Learning Associate, predicts mobile devices and apps will become ever
more multimedia oriented. Words are not enough anymore. Photos and videos
need to be added to communications. Look to smaller mobile friendly tools
like Pinterest, Snapchat, and Tumblr. The jury is still out on the success
of Google Plus.

Chris Bernard,
communications director, predicts that charities will lead the debate on
the civility of anonymous comments on social media and websites. He also
suggested that we resist the trend to ever-briefer communications. Some
things we need to convey need a bit more than a tweet to get across.

Andrea Berry, director of
partnership and learning, forecast that the multichannel fundraising trend
will grow in 2014. We’ll need lots of tools to reach our donors. She sees
a trend toward dedicated charity giving days like #GivingTuesday, in which
nonprofits compete for attention. Mobile will continue to be
transformative in the way we deliver services and work with each other
remotely.

Elizabeth Pope, director
of research and operations, predicts that constituent or client databases
will get simpler to use so that database manager roles will be changing.
She expects that databases will be more visual and results will be more
readable with better graphs and charts. The trend is toward nonprofit CRM
databases in which a variety of constituents (donors, volunteers,
newsletter subscribers etc.) will be included in a single database.

Laura Quinn, founder and
executive director, forecasts increasing confidence in cloud tools because
security and privacy concerns in the cloud are no greater than that in our
own offices. Mobile will more and more be everywhere. Our information we
send out will be viewed on phones more and more. Text messaging will be
bigger than ever. She predicts that passive data collection generated by
mobile phone GPS will be coming to the nonprofit sector in 2014.

How would I summarize all this? Certainly several of our celebrities mentioned ongoing concerns around privacy. The public debate spurred by the NSA spying
scandal won't go away any time soon. In a weird flip-side of that, as more data is stored in the cloud, there is a trend toward our using imaging tools and online databases to further our causes. Another trend that is bearing down on us is that multi-channel marketing is becoming a necessity for charities. And to do such marketing, we have to pay serious attention to the growing number of people using mobile devices to find us, donate to us, and volunteer for us. Peter Campbell said it best: "tablets will rule" in 2014. All we need to do is to integrate all this in our plans, but as Amy Sample Ward suggests, figure out how to also pull back
from the clutter and information overload. Happy new year!